State, Society and the Space

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s marked the triumph of a state-reducing agenda, an approach that mirrored the radical anti-statism of the first phase of neoliberal globalization. While some scholars tried to "bring the state back in" (Skochpol et al 1985), others kept advocating "governance without the state". With the end of the Cold War it was possible to hypothesize, if not “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), certainly the overcoming of the driving force that had dominated political development in the 19th and 20th centuries: the "modern state". The post-modern world of the 21st century could have become a stateless world. Around the turn of the millennium, however, this radical approach begun showing its weaknesses. Wild privatization and crony capitalism in post-socialist transitions, the threats posed by failed states to international stability, the failures of development aid due to the inefficiency and corruption of many weak states, ended up re-proposing the urgency of a new state building agenda. Part of this agenda revolves around the idea of “state capacity”. Some developments of the last 20 years promise to keep the State at the centre of attention: bringing it back in — and keeping it there. Indeed, there are some policy areas in which the leading role of states is stronger and apparently indispensable. These are areas in which the extent of the investments, the demand for planning and coordination, the need to define actions in terms of "national interest" and to place them in a context of multilateral cooperation, raise the challenge of a public government of development, domestically and internationally. Among the policy areas in which the state continues to play a fundamental role– and yet challenged by powerful private forces – is space. Because of the highly complex systems and state-of-the-art technologies involved, the long-lead development cycles and the considerable amount of human and financial investments required, space activities have historically been only within the remit of state actors. Although commercial ventures nowadays play a significant role in the space activities of many countries, even challenging the primacy of the state and often asserting the goal of conducting space activities independently from it, the public sphere remains indispensable. For one thing, public actors continue to represent the main source of funding in space activities as well as the main customers for most space products and services. National governments invest in space activities to support a variety of national objectives, including national security and defence objectives as well as socio-economic reasons and national prestige motives. Public actors retain a major role in managing space activities, especially in the strategic (proposing and implementing space policy), regulatory (supporting the development of regulations) and representation (nationally and internationally) dimensions. The proposed panel contributes to the new interest for the role of the State by developing a new framework for the study of statehood, in particular by developing new measures (indicators) of the strength and weakness of the state, focusing on the themes of space power, space politics, and space policy as case studies.

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